Klara KRISTALOVA | PERROTIN

Klara Kristalova is a storyteller who uses the plasticity of sculpture to build small micro worlds, where something peculiar has just happened or is about to happen. Here she relates to a sculpture tradition that has its roots several hundred years in the past.

Kristalova is part of the generation that acquired a higher artistic education in the late 80’s and early 90’s, during a period when modernism was seriously challenged. Her works, however, have never shown any tendency towards a programmatically motivated spirit of revolt. This can to some extent be explained by the fact that she is the daughter of Eugen Krajcik, a Czech artist in exile with an anything but dogmatic attitude towards the conventions of modern art. But this has even more to do with Kristalova’s consistent ambition to lower the highbrow tone inherent in most artistic expressions.

Kristalova steers clear of the rhetorical aspects of art, and instead deals with the small narratives, dreams and nightmares that everyday life is full of. She is drawn to an invisible part of everyday existence, to a realm where our expectations take shape, where neuroses bloom and memories mutate. This often results in her work acquiring a bizarre, slightly unsettling quality. Who would, after all, want to come face to face with the physical embodiment of one’s own inner demons?

Kristalova proceeds in a very psychological manner. She normally chooses materials (plaster, bronze, wood and ceramics) and proportions associated with traditional decorative arts found in environments differing radically from the white cube. This compels us to communicate closely with the artworks, thereby making it virtually impossible for us to recoil as we are overwhelmed by their significance. And significance and meaning are precisely what Kristalova aims to convey with her art. Here it is not a question of presenting prefabricated conceptions of life, but rather of creating the means by which the ambiguous nature of what one is looking at becomes a resource. A wall with a peeking man’s face incorporated among the stones, or two hedgehogs in bronze, involved in a strange interaction where the one is lying helplessly on his back and the other stands presumably guilty – as artworks these pieces may perhaps be visually neutral, but far from meaningless.

The first surprise is the use of colour. The glazed finish gives a shine to each of the figures. This paint on the sculpture is obtained after firing, after being in the kiln. It is one of the charms of these miniature productions. The iridescent effect provides a diaphanous appearance of drifting. The preparatory sketches are very similar to the final output. The ink is wet, smudging. In an unwitting watercolour, rings stain the paper.

Lachrymal heroines, Klara Kristalova’s figures call upon our entire store of common mythology. They are a combination of male and female, and are at the same time victims and executioners. How can the Ophelia of Millais (a British nineteenth-century artist) not spring to mind when heads are rolling on the ground like footballs, their tongues giving up the ghost? At ground level, raven-black hair lets a blue reptilian tongue stick out from the face. This severed head calls to mind the duo, Judith and Holofernes; to save her city the fair Judith had no qualms about seducing the Assyrian general and beheading him in his sleep. (…) Creatures of transfer and transformation, they evolve into otherness. Somewhere between dream and nightmare, reality and fiction, humanity and animality, idealisation and monstrosity, part and whole, they form an eccentric portrait gallery. The severed heads are not without some hint of Northern Europe. They bring us closer to the most famous of Denmark’s princes, Hamlet himself. The stuff of meditation, these conceits allow viewers to let their minds wander and to immerse themselves once more into the world of the cruel tales of our childhood.